


where the dogs of society howl

by floweryfran



Series: and i knew for sure (i was loved) [6]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Parent Tony Stark, Peter Parker Has Nightmares, Peter Parker Has Panic Attacks, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Peter Parker Whump, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark's Arm, Tony Stark-centric, or rather his lack of one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:01:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23974942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/floweryfran/pseuds/floweryfran
Summary: It’s Morgan’s crying that wakes him, but it’s Peter’s that worries him.The porch light is on, he sees. But rather than the one little form he expected to see, there are two. Shrouded in nighttime shadow, wrapped in layers for warmth, hunched over, the smaller cradling the larger.or, tony really needs to start working on a damn prosthetic. one-armed cuddles are really a pain in the ass.
Relationships: Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe) & Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe), Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Series: and i knew for sure (i was loved) [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1722340
Comments: 67
Kudos: 671
Collections: IronDad (and his Spiderson)





	where the dogs of society howl

**Author's Note:**

> distant description of an anxiety attack witnessed by another character, but it's really not even described at all! just being careful.

It’s Morgan’s crying that wakes him, but it’s Peter’s that worries him. 

Tony hasn’t been sleeping through the night with any sort of regularity. He tries, he takes supplements and pills and drinks tea, but it just doesn’t work like that when half of your body is made of nerve damage and the other half is made of the junkyard scraps of the universe and a bit of masking tape. 

His empty shoulder aches with biting constancy. It feels heavy. It itches. It stings like he’s pinched a nerve. There are no nerves to pinch. 

His right eye is almost blind and he still feels crooked when he walks. Like he’s seeing in halves, in quarters, fractals growing smaller until they hug the asymptote of what is here and darkness. 

But he feels so happy, so constantly happy, that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t. Not at all. Not when Peter sits at the kitchen table in the cabin with his hair sticking up, smelling like teenage boy and sewer, shoveling Tony’s Raisin Bran Crunch down his face hole like it’s the only thing keeping him from falling asleep where he’s perched. Not when Nat clicks her nails against the walls when she walks and curls on Tony’s couch like a cat wanting to be petted but not possessing the facilities to say so. Not when Sam helped him and Rhodey build a new, expanded porch, or when Shuri let him see her lab after she literally saved his life without having so much as met him beforehand. Not when May is drinking wine in his sunroom by the bucketful, pushing everyone into the lake when they stop paying attention with no bias as to whom it may be, eating every cookie Barnes makes before the rest of them so much as smell them. 

So Tony doesn’t sleep through the night. He’s not mad about it. It’s more time for him to fill with thoughts of everyone he loves, with complete and sickening gratitude as he sips at a mug of hot almond milk, the steam making his eyes water and his nose run. 

Tonight is different. He took his melatonin and drank his sleepy time tea and gulped down the pills Shuri and Banner synthesized to keep away infection in his shoulder, and felt as if he’d drank two glasses of wine or spent a long afternoon in the sun. Or as if he’d been hit right in the head with a hammer. 

He was tired, in other words. 

So he climbed into bed beside Pepper, who grinned at him, soppy and sweet with sleep. She cradled his head on her chest until he knocked off. 

But the sound of his baby upset could shake him from a coma, drill through coffin walls and wake him from death. It would ruin him a hundred times over and then twice more in spite. 

So he awakens. All at once, and that in itself is so unusual that he spends a moment wondering if he’s had a nightmare he can’t remember. 

But then another muffled sob comes pouring through the open window, hitching a ride on the midnight breeze, and it sends something terrible and sticky and aching down his spine, hot honey, a cup full of Phlegethon flames. His personal hell: his heart hurting. 

He slips his way out from under Pepper’s arm, grateful that she sleeps like Stonehenge—dignified and unmovable and for about ten millennia at a time. He pulls a sweatshirt on, suppressing a shudder in the chill of deep night, and shoves his feet into a pair of slippers before padding down the stairs, leaning heavily on the banister as he goes. He squints, cursing himself for forgetting his glasses. 

The porch light is on, he sees. But rather than the one little form he expected to see, there are two. Shrouded in nighttime shadow, wrapped in layers for warmth, hunched over, the smaller cradling the larger.

Tony walks faster.

He opens the glass door, then the screen door, both creaking, and the kids start each time. 

“Sorry, sorry,” he whispers, his voice almost lost amongst the hush of crickets and cicadas. “Hey. What’s up?”

Morgan looks up at him, her face sallow in the white porch light, tear-streaked and lip trembling. 

Peter does not look up, but Tony can see, now, his shoulders shaking. 

And that grabs his stupid, clumsy heart in a thick fist and squeezes it, because, for all of Peter’s drama, for all he’s been through, for how deeply Tony knows him, he’s never seen him cry. Perhaps that moment on the final battlefield should count, but Tony registers that entire day as a liminal space, an outlier, because it was so, so royally fucked up. 

Peter isn’t a crier. Not for any hypermasculine reason. He just expresses his emotional overflows in a different way. 

Morgan, poor Morgan, raises her arms towards Tony and says, “Petey’s crying so I’m crying.”

“Oh, Mo,” Tony breathes. “Okay. Come here, kiddo.” He lowers himself to sit on the boards of the porch, scooting forward until he’s directly beside Peter on the step, and Morgan wedges herself into Tony’s lap, pressing her snotty nose into his neck. He wraps his arm around her, his hand on the back of her head, holding her in place. 

He scoots closer to Peter, pressing their hips together. Their shoulders. 

It’s moments like these he despises all that he’s lost. He needs a second arm to hold his whole heart. It’s too much for one palm to cradle. And God fucking forbid Peter feel like he’s lesser than Morgan to him for this. As if he could love one more than the other. 

“Pete,” he breathes. 

Peter sucks in a ragged gasp.

Tony suddenly realizes with a flash of pain that Peter isn’t _crying—_ that what Morgan spotted, she identified as something she recognized. 

Tony had made sure she’d never seen him lose his breath, sit down in the middle of chopping zucchini because he’d been hit with a terrible fond flash of Peter spearing vegetables on a fork and flinging them at Happy across the dinner table. Never saw Tony pull Peter’s worn-through sweatshirt into his arms and bury his face in it so that every choked breath he could suck in would smell like his shampoo. Never saw him pull over in the middle of a car ride with his vision completely bent into the moment he and Peter had steered that donut ship into a crash landing on the face of an orange hellsite. 

But he can’t just toss Morgan aside so he can take care of Peter. He _can’t._ They’re both upset. And, as much as he’s inadvertently tried, he can’t make a double of himself to take care of what he hasn’t got the armspan for.

For a moment, the utter helplessness is enough to bring frustrated, hot tears to his own eyes. He’s useless this way. Being unable to take care of the pair of them at once is as good as being nothing to both.

Uncharted waters. Peter is the type who wants to be gripped tight when he’s panicky, to be held in place, as if the pressure calms him, as if small spaces are where he finds a grounding weight. Comfort to him is being pressed into someone else’s chest, a hand in his hair, a kiss pressed firmly against his forehead. A rough touch, a reminder of strength, that he is not breakable. 

For Tony, too, that’s true, but.

There’s no way for him to do that and cling to his wonderful fucking leech daughter at the same time.

So he tries.

_“When are you gonna come down?”_ he sings softly. _“When are you gonna land? I should have stayed on the farm; I should’ve listened to my old man.”_

Tony isn’t a great singer, but he can carry a tune. He sang to Morgan non-stop, even before she was born, draped beside Pepper on their bed with his lips pressed to the side of her rounded stomach, humming anything that came to mind. She’d kick, when he did, and Pepper would say she was dancing. She was raised on old tunes, classic melodies and open chords and Tony almost feels her key into his voice now. 

And this song—God, he loves this song, and he knows Peter does as well. It was something they listened to on long car rides to the compound, before everything fell apart. It would play in the lab and they’d toss their heads back, singing along to the chorus like a pair of drunkards in the corner of a bar when the sky was all moon and pin-prick stars. 

It feels both terribly wrong and obviously right to sing it now.

_“You know you can’t hold me forever—I didn’t sign up with you. I’m not a present for your friends to open, this boy’s too young to be singing the blues.”_

Morgan lifts her snotty face from his neck, sniffling stopped. She stares at him as he stares at Peter, turning his face so he’s almost breathing the words into Peter’s ear, hoping Peter can hear the way he’s fighting the waver in his voice. 

_“So goodbye, yellow brick road, where the dogs of society howl. You can’t plant me in your penthouse. I’m going back to my plow,”_ he sings, gruff, quiet. Breathy. A steady beat he subconsciously taps with the toes of his good leg. 

Peter’s breath is too quiet for him to hear. At least, that’s what he hopes it is. Peter has been known to hold his breath to try and stop the panic, almost like claiming his right to asphyxiating, and it’s terrifying and very, very bad and Tony doesn’t know how he would explain it to Morgan if Peter keeled over unconscious on the steps. 

But then Peter peers up from his knees, face peach-skin-splotchy but dry, and sings lightly, pitchy and tone-deaf as ever, _“Back to the howling old owl in the woods, hunting the hornyback toad.”_

Tony pulls a grin from the recesses of himself and continues, bouncing Morgan on his knee, _“Oh I’ve finally decided my future lies beyond the yellow brick road.”_

Morgan rubs her sleeve under her nose, then climbs across Tony’s thighs and into Peter’s lap. He catches her, and Tony’s heart stutters for a moment, because Peter looks frail—porcelain. He isn’t. He’s never been. He pulls Morgan tight against him, his face screwing up as he tucks his chin over her shoulder, and she plays with the ends of Peter’s hair as Tony finishes the next verse, gently, trying to keep the haunted hollowness he feels in his stomach from affecting it, _“_ _What do you think you'll do then? I bet that'll shoot down your plane. It'll take you a couple of vodka and tonics to set you on your feet again.”_

Tony hates that verse. A sharp change from the way he sang it in college, arm in arm with Rhodey and whoever was kind enough to lay a hand on him, a rousing chorus. Now, the words are like pure lemon pith, and he spits them as delicately as he can. So when Peter jumps in, rocking Morgan side to side, voice still breathless and shoulders still shaking but graciously _there,_ Tony feels immensely grateful. He crosses his foot over Peter’s, turns so his hand can rest on Morgan’s back, and listens as Peter sings, _“Maybe you'll get a replacement. There's plenty like me to be found_ _—_ _mongrels who ain't got a penny, sniffing for tidbits like you on the ground.”_

“What’s a mongrel?” Morgan interrupts before Peter can warble the next verse. “And a tibbit.” 

“A tidbit?” Peter clarifies. His voice sounds terrible. Raw. Tony wants to hold them with everything he has, with an ache so fierce his eyes start to sting, because, for all Peter doesn’t cry, Tony weeps enough for the both of them.

“Mhm,” says Morgan.

“A mongrel is sorta like someone who behaves bad,” Peter says, “and a tidbit is like a crumb.”

“So you called me a crumb?” Morgan says, lifting her face from Peter’s neck to meet his eyes.

Peter gives a weak attempt at a smile. “Elton John did. Take it up with him. I bet he’d like to hear your opinion.”

“My opinion is that I’m much more than a crumb. I’m not even little. I’m so big now.”

“So big,” Peter says, voice cracking. 

“Hey, Momo,” Tony interjects, because he can’t help it, he can’t watch this, he fucking can’t, it’s breaking him. “I think Mommy will be awake if you want to go up and check on her—if you want to go lay down with her.”

Morgan looks at him and her eyes widen. “But Petey was so sad,” she says, and Tony’s eyes get stuck on the way she fists the neck of Peter’s sweatshirt. “He was so sad, Daddy, I don’t want to leave him now.”

“I know, baby,” Tony whispers, ears full of the bugs hissing, the grating white noise making him want to snap. He just needs to hold Peter. Then everything will be okay. “But I think this is a job Daddy is more suited to, right? Is it me who patches up your booboos, or do you patch up mine?”

“Both!” she cries, bouncing in Peter’s lap. He takes it like a champ, frankly, but the way he winces at the shout makes Tony certain he’s doing the right thing. “Both, I use my little doctor's kit on you when you get hurt all the time.”

“Well, this is a _big_ booboo, Mo.”

She thinks about this. “Like when I hit my head and I got blood all over the bathroom?”

Tony breathes a moment. He doesn’t need the horror of that memory layering on top of fuck all else he’s trying to juggle. “Just like that,” he says.

Morgan finally nods. She presses a loud kiss to Peter’s cheek—and Peter, wonderful Peter, looks at her like she’s the best thing he’s ever seen, stroking his thumbs over her cheeks once before pressing a kiss to the tip of her nose—and then she goes, yanking Tony’s earlobe as she passes, the quirk sticking since her baby days of grabbing everything that dangled. 

The sound of her footsteps disappears up the stairs. He prays Pepper will forgive him for this.

He faces Peter fully. Reaches out and tugs on the rope of his hoodie. “Hey, I’m sorry,” he says lowly. “I can only imagine the added stress of—forty pounds of pure unadulterated emotion weeping into you while you—”

“Freaked out,” Peter interjects. “While I freaked out. Tony, what are you—I should be the one—the one apologizing. I scared the shit out of her. It’s my fault she even—woke up, I was too loud on the stairs, and it’s my fault she cried, because I scared her.”

Tony tries to pull Peter into him with the arm that isn’t there. He freezes.

“Okay, switch,” he says, “switch with me right now before I freak the fuck out. I’m really already freaking, I’m freaking quite a lot, actually, but this is your turn to freak so I won’t—steal your spotlight.”

He stands, making room for Peter to scoot across the step behind him, to sit on Tony’s left. The moment Tony is sitting again, Peter nudges himself under Tony’s arm. 

Tony lets out a sigh of relief, pulling Peter nearer, pressing a fierce kiss on top of his head, and then another. 

“Don’t apologize for being upset when it’s something that can’t be helped,” Tony says. Now that he’s got an armful of Peter, he feels his heart settle into his chest. The soft sound of summer around them is more calming. The blackness is firefly-studded, starry silver. It smells like dew and mulch. He feels waifish, like something in a fairy tale. 

He adds, “You’re allowed to be upset, you know.”

“I know,” Peter mumbles.

“Hm. And you know you can always come get me, if you want me.”

“Didn’t think it was gonna be bad.”

Tony aches. “Even if, buddy.”

Peter takes a deep breath. It still stutters a little, and Tony feels every bump like a bruise. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” Tony asks. 

“Just another stupid dream,” Peter says petulantly, with every right to be so. “Same as always. Um. You know. The battle.”

“Yeah,” Tony says quietly. 

For him, the battle marks the moment he had everything he wanted. 

For Peter, it’s the moment he almost lost one of the last few stable things in his life. Tony doesn’t forget that.

“I’m right here,” he says. “You’re right here, too. And my heart is marching on. Can you hear it ticking? Sound okay? Anything I should worry about, big ears? Dumbo? I say this fondly, you know there’s nothing I love more than your Mickey ears. We can use those shits to go sailing, y’know.”

Peter moves his face from Tony’s shoulder deeper onto his chest, pressing his ear to the crater where his ribs had been carved out to make room for the reactor. 

“Mm, sounds good,” he says. “Sounds like it usually does. Like it’s tripping down a flight of stairs.” He sighs a little and presses closer against the spot.

Tony slides his hand up from Peter’s back to his head, cradling it in place. 

“Think there’s a few more verses to go of that song,” Peter says, muffled by Tony’s chest.

A shot of fond warmth runs through him and he finally finds himself able to smile. “You know, I think you’re right, Pete. You wanna hear ‘em? I might be able to pull a little something together for you, despite the delayed warning.”

Peter nods, hair rasping on Tony’s sweatshirt.

He clears his throat a little, tapping his fingers on the back of Peter’s skull to keep time, and breathes the chorus once more. _“So goodbye, yellow brick road, where the dogs of society howl.”_

Peter peeks up at him, a small, exhausted smile on his lips. He joins in. _“You can’t plant me in your penthouse. I’m going back to my plow.”_

It’s the best thing Tony’s ever heard. 

He pulls Peter closer yet, until he can feel the rise and fall of his every breath, and they watch the sky grow light around them. 

**Author's Note:**

> hi i love you all! this was on my tumblr first, go follow that [here!](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/floweryfran)


End file.
